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We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves: fear, desire, hope, still push us on towards the future, depriving us, in the meantime, of the sense and consideration of that which is to amuse us with the thought of what shall be, even when we shall be no more.—[Rousseau, Emile, livre ii.]
Knowledge and truth may be in us without judgment, and judgment also without them; but the confession of ignorance is one of the finest and surest testimonies of judgment that I know.
I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an honest diversion; or, if I study, ‘tis for no other science than what treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and how to live well.
Is not simplicity, as we take it, cousin-german to folly and a quality of reproach?
his are inductions and similitudes drawn from the most common and known actions of men; every one understands him.
He proposed to himself no vain and idle fancies; his design was to furnish us with precepts and things that more really and fitly serve to the use of life;
the simplest may there discover their own means and strength; ‘tis not possible more to retire or to creep more low. He has done human nature a great kindness in showing it how much it can do of itself.
Socrates teaches us that this is in us, and the way how to find it, and the manner how to use it:
What if knowledge, trying to arm us with new defences against natural inconveniences, has more imprinted in our fancies their weight and greatness, than her reasons and subtleties to secure us from them?
The one more sharp, pricks and makes us start, and more touches the soul; the other more constantly solid, forms, establishes, and supports us, and more touches the understanding. That ravishes the judgment, this wins it.
To what end do we so arm ourselves with this harness of science?
[“Our disease is poisoned with its very remedies”—AEnead, xii. 46.]
It pleases me to observe how much pusillanimity and cowardice there is in ambition; by how abject and servile ways it must arrive at its end; but it displeases me to see good and generous natures, and that are capable of justice, every day corrupted in the management and command of this confusion. Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation.
Now, our faculties are not so trained up; we do not try, we do not know them; we invest ourselves with those of others, and let our own lie idle; as some one may say of me, that I have here only made a nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread to tie them.
we naturalists I think that there is a great and incomparable preference in the honour of invention over that of allegation.
I deliver my ignorance in pomp and state, and my learning meagrely and poorly; this accidentally and accessorily, that principally and expressly; and write specifically of nothing but nothing, nor of any science but of that inscience.
